The Devil's Playground_ A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square - James Traub [134]
The offices of Clear Channel do not much resemble the raucous headquarters of Keith and Albee’s United Booking Office on the second floor of the old Palace Theatre, though the function is not so very different. Lauren Reid, whose job is to supply a package of shows to Clear Channel’s eighteen theaters, and its fifty-six subscription series, sits in a gray-carpeted office with a nice view east, toward the Condé Nast Building. Reid says that in most cities her big competition isn’t the ballet or the opera, but sports teams. The average theater she’s working with seats 2,800 people—immense, by Broadway standards—and this means that she has to find a crowd-pleasing product. “When we put together a package,” she says, “we always try to round it out, so you have maybe one megashow, like Lion King, one new hot revival, like 42nd Street, then you have a play slot and a slot for something different, like Riverdance. ” She says that she would love to aim a little higher, but there are, she says, “a limited number of cities where you have an audience for a straight play.” She would love to put together a circuit of smaller theaters for more modest and ambitious shows, but it hasn’t happened yet. And so the folks out in Minneapolis or Portland get David Copperfield and Seussical, though also Hairspray and The Producers— not August Wilson or Suzan-Lori Parks, perhaps, but also not Top 40 radio.
Scott Zeiger, the president of Clear Channel Entertainment, compares the theatrical operation to a television network that has owned and operated stations—the theaters and subscription series—as well as affiliated stations, which in this case means the “strategic partnerships” Clear Channel forms with other presenters. The central imperative is to keep the network supplied with popular product. Clear Channel takes the role of “associate producer,” “strategic partner,” or “strategic limited partner” on various Broadway productions, but the ultimate goal is to field shows that will play well on the road. In the mid-nineties, the company also began producing kiddie shows in collaboration with Nickelodeon and others. Clear Channel may claim credit for such dramatic fare as Rug-rats—A Live Adventure, Scooby Doo Stagefright, and Blue’s Clues Live. Liz Mc-Donald, who runs children’s programming, says that some of these shows can sell out Radio City Musical Hall many times over. I attended one rehearsal of an upcoming show called Dora the Explorer, based on a popular cartoon of the same name. Dora is a feisty little girl with a pet monkey who engages in educational and prosocial activities in the course of solving knotty mysteries. At one point the director, a Broadway veteran accustomed to somewhat more ambitious productions, instructed the villain, Swiper, to “come downstage and take a feather from Red Chicken.” Pausing to savor the sheer inanity of it all, he said, “I know: It’s derivative of Richard III. I know that, but the kids don’t know that.”
In 2000, the principal officials of Clear Channel Entertainment decided that the time had come to commission adult works as well. Unlike Disney, which has an archive of beloved material as well as a production line churning out mythopoetic cartoons on an annual basis, Clear Channel had to start from scratch. The company hired Beth Williams, a pianist who had conducted the pit orchestra in Les Miz and then